Daughter of the Spellcaster

by Maggie Shayne

  She had no idea if anyone believed her, but she gave them no time to argue. She made a beeline for the temple room, and closed and locked the door behind her.

  Peeling off her wet coat, she let it fall to the floor and took the scroll to the cabinet, tucking it far in the back, out of sight and nearly out of reach. Then she arranged jars and bottles artfully in front of it. She pulled the letter from her coat pocket and eyed it, wondering if there was time to read it.

  “Lena?” her mother called. “Are you okay up there?”

  “Yeah, Mom. I’m coming.” She put the letter in the cabinet as well, then closed it and left the temple room to head down the stairs, stopping to hang up her coat on the way.

  Somehow they got through the meal. Lena caught Bahru looking at her oddly once or twice, especially when he asked how the baby was doing, and she felt the blood drain from her face as she answered him. “My baby is strong and healthy, and she’s going to stay that way.”

  He smiled. “I’m certain the child is male.”

  “Then you’re wrong. She’s a girl.”

  His expression turned to one of confusion for a moment, but at least she’d distracted him from her almost angry reaction to what seemed, on the surface, a casual, even thoughtful, question. She knew he was up to something. She knew it.

  And with every minute that passed, she felt more and more certain that she had to get herself and her baby the hell away from Bahru and the shadowy presence that had inhabited the house, away from the cave, and even away from Havenwood. And Mom and Ryan needed to get away, too. They should all leave together. Tonight. As a family.

  Finally Bahru left. Lena followed him to the door, eager to be rid of him but smiling all the way. She opened it, saying goodbye, good-night, sleep well, all the usual crap. But she didn’t feel relief when she closed it again. She didn’t feel relief until he’d walked halfway back to his cottage, and she was still peering out the window, watching him, as he disappeared into the darkness.

  “Lena, what is going on with you?” Ryan asked. “You’re as antsy as hell tonight.”

  “Nothing.” Not until Bahru was back in his cottage and the lights were on, she thought, still staring out into the night. Then she would tell him.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. No. I mean, there is something, but... We’ll talk later.” Her mother was in the kitchen, clearing up all by herself. “I should help Mom.” She gave one more glance out the window. Bahru had to be almost back to the cottage now.

  “Well, give me just a minute first, will you?” Ryan asked. “I have something I want to ask you, but...in private.”

  She raised her eyebrows, and a whole new sort of nervousness flooded into her brain and body, completely tugging her attention away from Bahru and the cave, the letter and the parchment pages. Everything tingled. Her stomach knotted. He had something to ask her? In private?

  “Um...sure. Okay.” She glanced toward the kitchen, where her mother was humming as she ran hot water into the sink. “Where do you want to...talk?”

  “Here is fine.” He led her back to the sofa, and she sat down. “And don’t worry about the dishes. I’ll go relieve your mother momentarily. You should just rest. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She wondered if he would get down on one knee. She wondered if she should tell him about Bahru first—but that would really ruin the moment, wouldn’t it?

  He took a breath. She could tell he was nervous. But he didn’t get down on one knee. He just sat beside her on the sofa. “All right, here it is. I wanted to tell you sooner, but after you told me about that dream, I didn’t dare.”

  She blinked, completely confused. What did her dream have to do with his proposal?

  “My father left me something—something...weird.”

  Her eyebrows pushed against each other. “Something weird,” she repeated, beginning to suspect this wasn’t going to be a marriage proposal after all.

  “The note he left with it warned me not to tell anyone about it. But I need to tell you, because the thing is...it’s enchanted or something.”

  “Your father left you an enchanted...something?”

  “A knife,” he said.

  He could have gut-punched her and not driven the wind out of her lungs any faster.

  “Gold, all engraved with symbols. It came in a carved wooden box that looked antique. Possibly ancient.”

  She had to remind herself to breathe, and when she did it was in short, openmouthed little gasps, which didn’t provide enough air at all. She thought she was going to pass out. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I was going to,” he said. “But then you had that dream, where you thought I was going to...”

  “Kill me.”

  “And the description of the knife—it matched.”

  “So you hid it from me.”

  “I put it under the seat of the truck,” he said. “I didn’t want it in the house. I thought it was dangerous to have it around you and the baby.”

  The baby. Always the baby. She got to her feet, looked toward the kitchen, wondering if her mother had lied to her, too, when she’d said there was nothing under the seat of his truck.

  “Lena, don’t look like that.”

  “Like what?” She was standing between the sofa and coffee table. He was still sitting, blocking her escape in that direction, but she could back up, and she did, one trembling step at a time.

  “Like you’re afraid of me. I would never hurt you, I swear it. It’s just that...the knife disappeared. It’s not where I left it, and I was wondering if you maybe found it or moved it, or...?”

  “Yes. I found it. I saw you hiding something from me, so I went out there and looked to see what it was. I found the very same blade that you used to murder me in my vision.”

  “Dream. Nightmare. Not vision.”

  “Vision. I saw the same thing in the chalice. The one your father left to me.”

  He frowned. “That’s right. And the chalice has powers, too. You said—”

  “The power is in the witch. Tools are just tools.” But even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. And she also knew that the chalice and the blade were intricately bound to one another. Mated.

  “Yeah, well, this knife is considerably more than just a tool, believe me.” He looked at her inching away from him and pushed his hands through his hair in frustration. “Every time I pick it up, it...it shoots sparks. Fire. It blasts things, Lena.”

  She stopped inching.

  “I set the curtains in Dad’s study on fire the first time I touched it. Then, the other night, I set the weeds on fire out back.”

  Lena’s heart was pounding with something she’d never felt in his presence until now. Fear.

  “I was reading one of those books my dad left you, and I found a chapter about how to cleanse and consecrate magical tools, so I thought that might help. I tried burying it outside overnight. You know, in case it had...bad mojo or something.”

  “And how did that work out for you?” Her voice was trembling. She clamped her jaw and cleared her throat.

  “I don’t know. I still can’t seem to control the thing.” He lifted his eyes to meet hers. “Or I couldn’t, last time I tried. But now it’s gone and I don’t know who has it, and between what I’ve seen it do and what you’ve dreamed of it doing—”

  “Of you doing.”

  “I think the thing is dangerous. I think we need to find it.” He swallowed hard, rising to his feet. “God, I hate seeing that fear in your eyes. Lena, how can I make you believe I would never hurt you? I swear, I wouldn’t.”

  “I know.” But she didn’t. She didn’t know at all. She didn’t even know how he felt about her. Just today she had thought things were beginning to change, but up to then it had just been practical for him to be
here, to be close by, two parents, one child. There had been no love. Not the wild, all-consuming, die-without-you kind of love she needed from him. Passion from time to time, yes, but not that fiery, unbridled, soul-fire kind of love. Not the kind she remembered from the prince of her past.

  “You said you found the knife,” he told her softly. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  She shrugged. “I had Mom check, and she said there was nothing there. I thought I had...hallucinated it.”

  “Well, you didn’t. And that should tell you that you can trust me, Lena, because if I meant to hurt you, it would have been better for me to let you go on believing you had imagined it. Wouldn’t it?”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  She held his eyes, searching them, wishing she could read his soul. “I told Bahru. I thought he might know something about it.” But then his eyes flashed red, and later I saw him talking to a demon in a cave behind a waterfall, and the cat thinks he’s evil.

  She didn’t say any of that last part out loud, though. How could she? For all she knew he and Bahru were in this thing together.

  Doesn’t make any sense. Ryan hates Bahru, always has.

  You willing to risk your baby on that?

  “No,” she whispered.

  “No what?” Ryan asked.

  She stopped inching, just turned and walked away. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  He lunged after her, grabbing hold of her arm and turning her to face him again. “Lena, you can’t honestly believe—”

  “Let go of me.” The words fell like chips of ice, emotionless, deep, commanding.

  He looked down at his hand on her arm, then let go. “I wouldn’t hurt you or the baby, you have to know that.”

  “Right now all I know is that I don’t want to be anywhere near you or Bahru or the damn house ghost or—”

  “The house ghost? I thought he was gone.”

  “Not far enough.” She moved past him to the kitchen, and this time he let her go.

  * * *

  The dishes were finished, the house in order, and Ryan was in the attic, poring over books on mysticism as if his life depended on it. Lena tugged her mother into the temple room with her, then closed the door and turned the lock.

  Interior doorknob locks were pathetic at best. Easily picked, she knew, but she hoped that wouldn’t matter. She hurried to the window to take a look outside. The sky was clear and dark blue, sparkling with stars that seemed to blink into existence out of nothing with every few seconds that passed. “Sleet-storm warning, my ass,” she muttered.

  “Honey, what in the world is going on with you?”

  She let the curtain fall back into place and turned to face her mother, noticing the cat for the first time. She was curled up on the altar, blinking as if they had disturbed her from a very important nap. “I should have known this is where you’d be,” Lena said. “I think you’re smarter than all of us. This is the safest room in the house.”

  Her mother blinked and looked at the cat, then back at Lena. “Tell me what’s wrong. You acted like you wanted to throw Bahru out the door at dinner.”

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t exactly gushingly friendly to him, either. Why is that, Mom?”

  Selma averted her eyes. “I don’t know. I feel...nervous and unsettled around him. But only since—”

  “Since that night you can’t remember?”

  Selma met her daughter’s eyes again, frowning. “Yes. Since that night. How did you know?”

  Lena lowered her head, pacing away, circling naturally in a clockwise direction. “You know those pictures on your cell phone? The ones you don’t remember taking?”

  “Yes. People in monks’ robes standing around a fire in the woods.”

  Lena nodded. “Today I saw Bahru with a robe just like that.”

  “When? Where, for goodness’ sake?”

  “When I went out after the cat.” She paused by the altar and ran her hand over the animal’s silky soft head, down her back. “She was leading me, Mom. I swear she was leading me.”

  Selma’s eyes shifted from the cat, then back to Lena, over and over. “Leading you where, honey?”

  “That spot with the pond and the waterfall that overlooks the lake. There’s a cave behind the waterfall that I didn’t know was there.”

  Selma frowned. “A cave? I’ve never seen a cave.”

  “Well, it’s there,” Lena said harshly, and saw her mother’s eyes widen at her tone. “Bahru was just inside, talking to someone. A large, dark, shadowy shape.”

  “A dark, shadowy shape...like the house ghost?”

  Lena nodded. “Bahru told it that if he had known we were going to banish it from the house, he would have stopped us.”

  Selma’s eyes widened even further.

  “He called it ‘Master’ and, worse, he said once the baby comes my power would die and then ‘it’ would live again.”

  “My God. Are you sure?”

  Lena nodded hard, deciding not to mention the letter or the pages. Not until she knew what they contained. Goddess, she was half afraid that when she went to look at them again, they would be gone. Vanished. Afraid she’d been imagining them this whole time.

  “We can’t trust Bahru, Mom. And I don’t think we can trust Ryan, either.” Then she finally told her mother about her visions of him stabbing her with a golden knife immediately after the birth of their child. The same knife she’d had her mother look for in his truck.

  “But it wasn’t there,” Selma said.

  “I know. He said someone took it. He told me about it earlier. He has it, Mom. Or had it. That exact blade, only now it’s missing. And the only person I told about it was Bahru.”

  Selma listened, and her face grew harder with each word Lena said. In the end she put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “We’re going to leave here—just the two of us. Tonight. We’ll leave everything behind.”

  “Mrrrow,” said the cat.

  “Everything but the cat,” Selma amended. “We’ll go where no one can find us, and that’s where we’ll stay until the baby comes. All right?”

  Lena nodded. “That’s exactly what I was going to say. But we have to be sneaky. We have to get out of here without Ryan or Bahru knowing about it.”

  “If Ryan is somehow involved in...in whatever is going on here,” her mother said softly, “if he’s got some kind of mystical connection to you and the baby, then how can we get away without him knowing, honey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Drawing a deep breath, then releasing it all out at once, Selma moved across the room to open the wooden cabinet, then reached to the back and brought out a small burlap pouch with a drawstring closure. She unknotted it and drew out a tiny ornate bottle of smoky dark glass with a pewter vulture for a stopper.

  “What’s that, Mom?”

  “Belladonna,” she said. “A few drops in his tea—or, better yet, cocoa, because the sweetness will cover the taste—and he’ll sleep for hours.”

  Lena stared at the vial. “A few drops too much could kill him.”

  “I know. I’ll err on the side of caution. In case we’re wrong and he’s innocent.”

  Lena bit her lip, her heart bleeding, her mind swirling. Images of the prince who would have done anything to save her warred inside her troubled mind with the Ryan whose attitude until recently had seemed so indifferent, so dispassionate. And both men battled in her mind against the image of the man standing over her bed, raising a dagger over his head to drive it into her heart.

  Which one was real?

  Lowering her head, she shook it slowly. “I can’t let you do it, Mom. I can’t risk hurting him. I love him so much. I want to think I’m wrong. I want to be
lieve there’s some explanation for the dream, the vision.”

  “You’re risking your child’s life, Lena.”

  “No, I’m only risking my own. He won’t hurt Eleanora. I know that much for sure.”

  “Would you risk the life of your child if you weren’t sure?” Selma asked.

  Lena shook her head. “Of course not, Mom.”

  “So how can you ask me to risk the life of mine?”

  “I’m an adult. It’s my life to risk. I love him. I’d die for him. It’s worth it. I do want to sneak away, I do want to have the baby somewhere safe and figure out the rest of this afterward. I want to stay alive to raise my child. But I can’t risk Ryan’s life to do that. What if I’m wrong?” She closed her eyes and prayed that there was a rational explanation for everything she’d seen in the chalice. “We’ll get out of here, Mom, but we’ll find some way to do it that doesn’t involve poisoning Ryan. All right?”

  Selma looked down, blinking tears from her eyes. “All right, hon. If that’s what you want.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  15

  “Ryan?”

  Ryan looked up from the book he was perusing, all about hauntings and ghosts and banishing them, to see Selma poking her head up through the trapdoor into the attic. He’d had one brief, idiotic moment when he’d hoped it was Lena. But no, he’d scared the hell out of her, destroyed any trust she’d had in him, and it was going to take something huge to win it back.

  If he could. It was beginning to feel to him as if she stopped trusting him every time he hiccupped lately. And he wondered why that was.

  “I’m not interrupting, am I?” Selma asked.

  He shook off his brooding and smiled a welcome. It felt weak, but she would understand. She came the rest of the way up, a steaming, chocolate-scented cup of cocoa in her hand, the smell tickling his taste buds to life.

  “I was having cocoa before bed, and I thought you might want some, too.” She crossed the dim attic carefully and set the mug on an upturned wooden crate near his side. The light was on, a dusty bulb dangling from the ceiling with a long pull-chain attached. It was great for reading but awful for people. Even sweet Selma had an almost evil hue to her under that harsh overhead glow.